Month in Review | My July Favorites

Happy Friday everyone! This month I tried out doing a Friday Favorites each week, and I really enjoyed it (and hope you did too!) This week’s Friday Favorites is going to be my monthly favorites from July.

Favorite Blog Posts from the Month:

I’ve been sharing some of my favorite blog posts from my favorite sewists around the web in my Friday Favorites and wanted to highlight a few of mine (and your favorite based on the most read!) posts of the month from Handmade by Lara Liz:

Cricut– If you follow a bunch of sewing and crafting bloggers on Instagram, you probably have seen all the rave reviews about the Cricut and Cricut’s new machine the Cricut Maker. I bought a Cricut Air 2 this month and I LOVE it! I’ve made so many projects with vinyl already and can’t wait till the Cricut Maker comes out this month. I have a couple Cricut posts planned for the month of August – because us sewists can be multi-crafters too, right??

I only read two books this month, one was really really good and one was okay. I need to get back into the habit or reading at night and listening to books in the car. I’ve gotten into a habit of listening to the news in the car and gosh, it’s stressing me out – so I need to switch back to books….

Inside the O’Briens – This book is one of my favorite books I’ve read in a while. If you read Still Alice or saw the movie, you know Lisa Genova’s style of writing/story telling. Here’s the summary from Amazon: “Joe O’Brien is a forty-three-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s disease.”

“Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure, and each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.”

This book is so compelling, so gripping and so heart wrenching as it follows his journey and his family’s journey. I could not put it down. I read it at home and listened to it in the car (a book + audible combo) and when I would get to work, I could barely convince myself to get out of the car to stop listening! I’ve heard really good things about her book Left Neglected, so I think I’m going to read that next!

The Dressmaker’s Dowry: A Novel – I won’t even lie, I picked up this book because it was about Dressmakers. It was good, but definitely not the best book I’ve ever read. From the Amazon description, “The novel tells the story of two women: one, an immigrant seamstress who disappears from San Francisco’s gritty streets in 1876, and the other, a young woman in present day who must delve into the secrets of her husband’s wealthy family only to discover that she and the missing dressmaker might be connected in unexpected ways.” It was written in multiple voices (different person each chapter) which is probably my favorite style of book. It as captivating and a quick read.